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I imagine the reason you'd want UK hosting is because you're serving customers in the UK. Contrary to popular belief, it does matter where your web servers are located. If they're physically close to the people they're serving, latency times (ie the time it takes for a piece of data to make the round trip between the client and the server) will be better. For example - I am currently connected to the internet via a business SDSL line on the south coast of England, I can ping our web hosting servers which are in London, and the response time I get is approximately 10ms. If I ping any server in the US, the quickest response I can expect is something like 100ms. If I ping Australia, it's even worse. Even at the speed of light, data does take significantly longer to get to the US and back. 100ms may not sound like much, but when you bear in mind that's an extra 90ms added to every single file that's requested from your server - if your website is very image-heavy, this can add up to a lot.
So purely from a performance perspective it makes sense to have servers close to the people they're serving - but it's also morally the right thing to do. Bandwidth in the UK is expensive - part of the reason it's expensive is because a significant portion of UK traffic goes over the transatlantic links - in other words, in the UK we access just as many US-based sites as UK ones. The transatlantic links are expensive to install and maintain and it's this that drives up bandwidth costs. Deliberately hosting websites intended for a UK audience in the US in order to save on bandwidth costs is not only bad from a performance perspective, but it's also bad nettiquette' because doing so increases traffic on the transatlantic links and consequently drives up prices for those of us who do things properly. Basically, those of us who choose to do the right thing are subsidising the cheapskates who host in the US as a cost saving measure.
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